A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (19 page)

Ali stopped, reread what he’d written, and deleted the last two sentences before pressing SEND. He couldn’t say anything that would pressure her to meet him. If she wanted to come, she knew where he’d be at nine o’clock that evening. He’d keep telling her every day where he was going to be; it would keep the bond alive between them until she was ready to forgive him for having sinned.

The Second Floor was a coffeehouse that had opened only six months earlier, but Karachi’s intelligentsia flocked to its poetry readings, musical concerts, lectures, and workshops. People who had returned from America, Canada, or Great Britain, looking for a place to help them forget that they were in Karachi, came to browse the tiny bookshop and try out the mouthwatering iMacs and MacBook laptops on display. Artists exhibited their graphic designs and oil paintings and watercolors on the brick walls, while a colorful mural on the opposite side of the room created lively debate among the customers about its surrealism: shirtless men painted in tones of sepia clasped each other as they walked among bright green fields, other similarly shirtless men performing manual labor in the shadow of an oversized tractor and a red-fronted truck.

As Ali walked into the coffeehouse, two women were standing in front, arguing.

“I think it’s vibrant,” said one. “Who’s the artist?”

“Someone called Asim Butt. I don’t understand it!” replied the other.

A fluttering movement from above caught Ali’s eye and he looked up: from a beam in the ceiling dangled a copy of the Pakistan constitution with a single word scrawled in black marker across its front: SUSPENDED.

He found a seat in the back row, making sure he had a good view of the projection screen set up in a corner of the room. The chairs quickly filled up with people, eager, nervous students,
khaddar
-clad NGO types, journalists from various newspapers and magazines, teachers, and professors. Ali recognized a few of them; most were his age, while some were in their forties and fifties. He nodded to familiar faces, counted the black armbands on their arms, and reached and took a sticker from a pile on a nearby table. Printed on the sticker were the words
Restore Democracy Now!
and a black palm print with a red thumbprint.

At a quarter after nine, two young men and a woman got up to the front of the room and introduced themselves as the organizers of the movement: Imran, Bilal, and Ferzana, activists who held day jobs in a law office, a school, and a newspaper group. Ferzana pressed a button on the laptop and the overhead projector began to beam images and words onto the screen. Bilal, the lawyer, explained them, waving his hands in elegant circles to emphasize his points.

“As you know, the Supreme Court dismissed all the petitions challenging Musharraf’s eligibility to contest the elections on November nineteenth. And on the twenty-first, the president handed down the order that amended the Constitution—”

“The suspended Constitution,” called a man, pointing at the ceiling, as the audience snickered.

Bilal grinned. “Yes, the suspended Constitution. And what the PCO said was basically that all actions taken during this emergency are legal.”

The audience muttered their disapproval, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes.

“Pakistan was suspended from the Commonwealth yesterday. The Western countries are putting pressure on Musharraf to hold fair elections. But the United States is reluctant to get rid of a ruler who is so willing to do their bidding when it comes to the War on Terror. That’s why this People’s Resistance Movement is so crucial. We need to show that we won’t accept the undemocratic actions of this government, no matter what the West says.”

“Quite right. Quite right.”

“The judges have already been deposed, and now they’re under house arrest: Munir Malik is seriously ill and in need of dialysis, but they won’t let him go for treatment to the hospital. Same thing with our prominent human rights people—Asma Jehangir, Hina Jilani, Iqbal Haider, I. A. Rahman all under house arrest. And it’s not just well-known figures, but thousands of people who have been illegally detained or who are missing, in the Frontier, in Balochistan, in Sindh and Punjab. All their lives are in danger.”

Imran spoke up at this point. “The suspension of the Constitution has given Musharraf unchecked powers to do what he likes, without regard to human rights violations. Here, have a look at your rights that have been taken away.”

A new slide appeared on the screen:

Suspended Rights:

Article 9 (Security of Person)

Article 10 (Safeguards to Arrest and Detention)

Article 15 (Freedom of Movement)

Article 16 (Freedom of Assembly)

Article 17 (Freedom of Association)

Article 19 (Freedom of Speech)

Article 25 (Equality of Citizens)

Ali murmured along with everyone else, wondering which fact was more depressing: that these rights had been snatched from them or that he hadn’t even known he possessed them in the first place.

“And now, today,” continued Bilal, “the Supreme Court—”

“The false Supreme Court!”

“The illegal Supreme Court!”

“The bastards!” A roar of laughter followed this last cry.

“The Supreme Court has handed out a clean chit to Musharraf. They’ve validated the emergency, the PCO. And criticized the deposed judges for standing in the way of law and order.”

Amid the rumbling, a girl said, “So how can we help?”

“Yes, what can we do?” Ali said. He and the girl looked at each other. She wore boxy spectacles, the kind that pretty girls used to look extremely intellectual. Her long, golden-brown hair was done up in a messy chignon. He smiled at her and she nodded in reply. This was the kind of girl who wouldn’t give him a second glance on the street. If democracy could get him this kind of action, then he was all for it! Then Ali remembered Sunita and quickly turned his attention back to the front of the room.

Ferzana took the microphone from Imran. “Believe me, we all know the feeling of helplessness. It’s been like this for the last thirty years, the citizens at the mercy of the army. But we’re determined to show the world that the people of Pakistan do not want dictatorship. We’re going to make sure our voices are heard.”

“How?”

“Protests. Marches. Vigils. Blogs. Keeping in contact with the outside world no matter how many media restrictions are in place and how many times they bring down the Internet. We’ll make sure that the international media, human rights watchdogs, Amnesty International all know about what’s going on in Pakistan. We’ll pass around a clipboard; please leave your cell phone number and email address, because that’s the way we’ll contact you to let you know when something’s going to happen where you can participate. Our idea is to be smart protestors, because we know that the army and the establishment are out to get us. You can imagine why we won’t want to announce our events in the newspaper.” As laughter burst out once more, Ali took the clipboard from his neighbor and hesitated only a moment before writing down his telephone number. Then he quickly wrote down Sunita’s cell phone number and email address just beneath his.

Ferzana leaned forward and stabbed at the computer with her finger. The screen dissolved into a new image: protestors on the ground, bruised and bloodied; police above them, beating them with long wooden rods. People in the audience gasped out loud. Ferzana let the image linger for a few silent minutes, then she clicked the keyboard again and the picture was replaced by one last slide:

Our Aims:

Support the civil rights organizations

Demand the suspension of financial and military aid to Pakistan

Restore the Constitution

Release political prisoners

Restore the judiciary

End media curbs

Musharraf should step down as head of the army

Free and fair elections

They left this up on the screen so that even after the meeting was over and people were breaking up into small groups to drink coffee and discuss what they’d heard, everyone would remember what they were fighting for. The journalists in the audience clicked off their digital recorders, while students copied the list of aims into notebooks with bright cartoon figures dancing on the covers. Ali wandered around, ordered a cup of coffee from the bar, then sat down with a group that included Ferzana, a few journalists, and the girl with the square-rimmed glasses.

“Free and fair elections is all very well,” said one of the journalists. “But who are our choices? The same damned crooks that stole everything from us the last time around?”

Ferzana nodded. “I know what you mean. But things have changed since eight years ago. Pakistan’s changed. There’s bound to be new faces. We have to participate in the election process; we can’t just let the army go on throwing their weight around because there’s no alternative. That’s their line, isn’t it? All along they’ve said that democracy doesn’t work. We have to show them that it can and it will.”

“Who are you going to vote for?” asked the girl with the glasses. Ali leaned in closely to hear the answer.

“Benazir, definitely.”

“What? Why her?” Ali blurted out loud. As all eyes turned to him, he swallowed nervously. They were watching him, politely waiting for his input. For a moment Ali was speechless. He couldn’t tell these people that he mistrusted Benazir because his father had loved her so much. But he recalled that this was precisely the reason he did resent her: she was the child his father had wished for, instead of the son he had actually gotten. The pride that his father should have invested in him, in Haris, in Jeandi, had been diverted to an icon to which none of them could ever measure up. And if Ali’s father had tried to escape the dissatisfaction he’d felt with his own family by obsessing on Benazir, then Ali had done exactly the same thing—except where Ali’s father had heaped all his admiration and hopes on Benazir’s shoulders, Ali had laid all the frustration and rejection he felt from his father at Benazir’s feet.

“I just think she’s a Western tool,” Ali said lamely, while his mind clambered around all these fleeting thoughts.

“It’s not about being a Western tool,” said Ferzana. “She speaks their language. She’s a woman. She’s Westernized, secular, intelligent, articulate. They feel they can trust her. That’s important—as much as the West has interfered in our affairs since God knows when, we still need to work with them.”

“Besides,” added Salma, the girl with the glasses, “isn’t Benazir a great symbol for how we want our country to be? We don’t want to be ruled by the Taliban, or the mullahs. She’s the exact opposite of them. That’s why the fundos don’t like her. She makes them nervous.”

“But she’s a feudal,” said the journalist.

Ali cringed. How many times had someone said the only way to solve Pakistan’s problems was to eliminate the feudals, enact land reforms, destroy their power base? “We need a revolution!” they said. “Kill the feudals. Redistribute their land. Get them out of parliament and government. End this tyranny once and for all!” Then, when they found out that Ali himself was a Sindhi, they’d halfheartedly apologize, thinking that he, too, was one of them. “We don’t mean you. We know you’re not like that.”

“I’m not a feudal,” was always Ali’s answer. If he said it often enough, he told himself, it would stop feeling like he was trying to claim his brown eyes as blue, or his blood type as O when it was really A. But unlike the lie he always told about his father, this one had yet to feel true.

He held his breath and waited to see how Ferzana and Salma would respond now.

Ferzana said, “Maybe that’s where she came from, but that’s not where she’s going. She’s educated. She has a different outlook on things. She values justice, democracy. Religious freedom. Women’s rights. That’s what Pakistan needs. That’s what Pakistan wants.”

“She did nothing for women when she was last in government!” said the second journalist, a woman.

“She couldn’t. Her hands were tied,” said Ferzana. “The army was still calling the shots. And she was only thirty-five years old when she became prime minister. Think about that. Could you have run an entire nation at that age?”

“And the money that she stole?” said Ali, at last.

“She should give it all back if she cares so much for this country,” said the woman journalist, nodding in agreement with Ali.

“I saw a great cartoon in the newspaper,” said Salma, putting her hand over her mouth to stop the giggle that was already trying to escape. “There was this poster on the wall, right? And it had a picture of Asif Zardari and it said,
Asif not to return to Pakistan.
And there was one of his polo ponies standing in front of the poster, weeping.”

Laughter broke out all around. Ferzana guffawed so hard that tears squeezed out of her eyes. The two journalists slapped palms; it was their newspaper in which the cartoon had been printed. Ali smiled at Salma, and she winked back at him

“Look, I’m not saying that Benazir is perfect. She made a lot of mistakes. There was a lot of wrongdoing in her government. But she’s paid her dues. She’s been in exile for eight years. Her husband went to jail for ten. I think she’s changed,” said Ferzana.

“Maybe,” added Salma, “she deserves a second chance.”

Ali sat at the table after everyone had left, pondering what Ferzana and Salma had said. Plenty of people said that Benazir’s first term had been all about revenge: for the death of her father at the hands of the military. That was why she had allowed her husband to ride roughshod over the country’s coffers with such impunity. Could she possibly be back for a different reason this time? To make amends? To seek redemption? Ali nursed his cup of coffee late into the night and thought about redemption and second chances until the waiters began to clean the tables and put away the chairs. Only when they turned off the lights did he leave, driving home so deep in thought that he almost missed the turn to his house.